My Cherryot

When they notice the paint is exuberantly jumping off of their car, normal people consider it might be a good time to buy a new car. But this, of course, is my car. It's older than my blog. I'd say it was older than dirt, but some of the original dirt is still on it.

I was surprised to notice the paint vanishment, though. I figured if you just left your car at the curb and never bothered it with soap or wax or anything, the paint would just stay put out of loyalty if nothing else. Or if it was inclined to wander, it would be sealed down with all the bird poop. I mean, otherwise, what is the point of parking under the power lines?

Actually, I was a little set back by the bird poop accumulation, which has far exceeded previous efforts, and was beginning to develop some topography. In my usual deductive fashion, I thought it was evidence of my efforts to attract more birds to the garden, or maybe evidence of a new digestive enthusiasm on the part of the regulars. Took me a few days before it occurred to me that my standard car hygiene--God's Car Wash--had pretty much shut down for the last year. We did get two inches of rain a couple weekends ago but that was by far the most we'd had since last January. If you've been dissuaded from moving to Oregon because it rains all the time, fear no more. Now we're the land of smoke and dead trees.

So after the rain a lot of the car looks a little neater now, not that I was inclined to get a new one anyway. It would be fun, and if I did it would be all-electric, but even an all-electric car has nothing on mine, virtue-wise. Mine's all-gas but it's parked. And there's a significant cost to the planet of manufacturing a new one. And the electricity for a car might come from coal. So. No new car for me, unless someone creams this one. Have at it.

 

Besides, there's a lot to be said for mine. If someone scuffs it up, as someone apparently just did last week, I don't really care. That's a freedom. My curb-feelers work great, and will until a little more rubber is scraped off the sidewalls. My blind-spot protection is second to none, as long as I have a passenger with a good set of lungs. Thanks to the hole in the floorboards that Dave created with his imaginary brake pedal, we've got a good auxiliary Fred Flintstone power boost system, or good enough--he's seventy now, so he can't keep up highway speeds for long like he used to.

 

The sound system isn't all it could be, I'll admit that. We still have a thumping bass but the treble is way out of practice and both of us have trouble with the lyrics of everything except Build Me Up Buttercup.

 

It might be nice to be able to unlock the doors from a few feet away, but you don't really need them unlocked until you get there anyway, even if it's raining, which it isn't anymore. We do each have to roll our own windows down by hand. But that's fun. It's worth it just to put a young person in the seat and watch them feel along the side panel for the button like they're trying to find the spot that makes the bookcase wall turn around in a mystery movie.

 

I'm sure I could get used to one bell or one whistle if I had it. I'd probably get to where I couldn't imagine doing without it. But there's also a lot to be said for keeping the number of things you can't live without to a minimum.

 

All Night, All Day, Watching Over Me

Here's the thing about birds. They're always doing something you should know about.  They're beautiful, even the ugly ones. They're all over the place. And if you pay attention to them, you will find yourself several notches happier, effortlessly. Besides, they're paying attention to you.

And yet most people pay so little attention to birds that they can't identify more than three or four. Here we are, under constant surveillance, and we're walking around completely oblivious to it, like the birds are Homeland Security or Facebook or something.

So I've advised people over the years to get in the habit of noticing birds. The noticing of birds is its own reward. After a while you're paying more attention to their troubles than your own, which is healthy, and cheering on their social conquests, and whacking neighbor cats on their behalf, and you're getting to know where to look for individual ones and what kind of nest they might be cooking up, and you're driving your car with your head out the window staring straight up, which can get loud and exciting too.

You could see someone special.

I might be amazed now at how unaware people are of what is all around them every day, but I used to be pretty unobservant myself. I remember thirty years ago Dave and I noticed that crows kept flying over the house heading southwest right around beer-thirty. That was the extent of our scrutiny. We didn't know where they were going or if it was just a little group of them going to Book Group in the next block or what. Years later, when we were paying attention and doing a lot more walkabouts, we realized they were going downtown for the night, and they were gathering in big groups, and we did a little research and found out they like to roost together most of the year and only stay in their home trees during nesting season. And we began to admire them more and more. Their roosting place varied. Sometimes it was the south end of town, sometimes north, sometimes midtown. They'd fly around and make a bunch of noise, and we'd be home before they turned in proper.

A lot of people only notice birds when they poop. A while ago a woman wrote a letter to the editor. She'd encountered massive amounts of bird poop on the street and sidewalks and was incensed that the city didn't clean it up more often. Disease! Pestilence! Dry cleaning bills! She was het up. Sugar? You're in a city that owns one snow plow and employs a single pothole dude with a bucket. We aren't going to have a poop removal force. That's what rain is for.

So now I'm constantly watching crows and reading up on them and using words like "tactile rictal bristles" without embarrassment and, in general, thinking I know some stuff. And then my own oblivitude rears its baffled head yet again. I'm downtown for my monthly date with my friend Pat Lichen. I'd walked around a bit in the dark, vaguely taking in an interesting polkadot pattern on the pavement, without giving it much thought. When I meet Pat, she asks if I'd seen the heroic amount of bird poop on the street. Shoot! Of course. Usually when you see a bunch of bird shit it's all in a row under a light post or something, but this was all over evenly, like a Jackson Pollock painting, so it hadn't registered for me. "Don't look up!" I joked.

Learned that lesson more than once.

But we couldn't help it. We looked up. And there, in the dark winter silhouettes of elm branches, for blocks and blocks, with the starry sky beyond, were large black shapes, sleeping crows, thousands of sleeping crows, motionless, presiding over us heedless goofs below with our blathering and our headlights and our traffic and our pointless noise. A soft stratum of feathered life, a blanket over us all. We both knew about the roosts. But we'd never looked up.

Rhymes With Blitzkrieg

One second post-bird. Note mussed hair.

Dave stood rigid in the back yard. "The birds," he said. "They're after me."

His tone was flat, as though he had just divulged that the FBI had planted a chip in his brain.

I'm used to this kind of thing. It doesn't even disturb me anymore. Some of our newer neighbors, however, may not have had time to adjust. Many of them are still scarred by the afternoon we spent on the back porch when Dave was trying to teach me how to lip-fart. There was a lot of spraying, and correcting. I wasn't very good at it. It probably sounded like an argument between Sylvester the Cat and Joe Lieberman.

"Okay, honey," I said. "Let's just keep that to ourselves, okay?"

Then a bird dropped out of the sky and crashed beak-first into his forehead. I jumped back. "Holy shit!" I said. "What was that?"

Dave looked bleak and resigned. A second bird swooped down and strafed the front of his shirt. He trudged towards the laundry.

Many people believe that being pooped on by a bird is a sign of good luck. This is just how people are. You could be standing on the sidewalk and get your torso flattened by a runaway truck and as long as you've still got one lung going up and down, people will refer to you as lucky. If you then got coated with bird poop, well, might as well buy a lottery ticket: your good fortune knows no bounds.

There have been a number of stories in the news of birds dive-bombing people. One blackbird in San Francisco was so famous and reliable, people sat in lawn chairs across the street just to watch the blitzkrieg. Brought nachos, and everything. And a red-tailed hawk made news in Stonington, Connecticut, whacking people upside the head, even the ones that did not look like pigeons.

Then there was the mail carrier in Tulsa who was repeatedly harassed by a mockingbird. As a former mail carrier, I am surprised this even became an issue. Anyone who has been tailed all day by a chubby postal supervisor in polyester pants and a white belt carrying a clipboard should be able to take a mockingbird in stride. However the station manager reportedly did take the customary action and distributed the standard bad-dog form letter to all the patrons on the carrier's route, crossing out "dog" and inserting "mockingbird." (Dog letters are the official postal response to a threat by a vicious dog. The supervisor prints one out, puts it in an envelope and hands it to the carrier to deliver to the house with the vicious dog. To which the carrier says, "no, you.")

Among the useful tidbits I learned in my career was the observation that when you come upon a truly heroic pile of bird poop, no matter how curious it makes you, you're better off not looking up to see where it came from. You'd think this would be obvious, but it isn't. I once told that story to a group of friends one evening, and the very next day we were touring an ancient church and came upon a line of encrusted bird poop on the floor that stretched the width of the church like the net on a ping-pong table. Every single person looked straight up at the cable strung between the walls. Fortunately, nothing adverse happened, because Dave had lagged behind and drawn all the birds.

Last year, birds in Florida were affected by the harsh winter, which caused the palm berries to rot and ferment, adding a zing to the birds' diet. Birds were crashing into things, pooping inappropriately, staying up too late and singing "Danny Boy" into the wee hours. And bombing people.

Dave's tormentors are stone cold sober. Presumably he looks particularly threatening to nesting birds who are trying to protect their young, or who are trying to impress potential mates. I know I find it impressive. I could watch for hours. But for those who object to this kind of attention, there are several ways to deflect it. You can carry an open umbrella at all times. Or you could print out a large set of eyes and tape them to the back of your head. Neither of these solutions is likely to shine up Dave's reputation around here.

It isn't just birds. All flying things are attracted to Dave. We've used that to our advantage while picnicking, setting him off to the side a ways where he glumly ingests his hot dog while enveloped in a nimbus of mosquitoes. Perhaps he would be useful on a birding expedition as well. We can set him out in the field, throw away the spotting scopes and anticipate a close encounter. He's tall and has a big head. Maybe if he stands real still near the water, he might even accumulate an osprey nest.

But now that birds are falling out of the sky in rafts, in Arkansas, and Louisiana, and Sweden, I think it's best we just keep him inside. I'm as concerned about the birds as anybody. No one knows what's going on, and it can't be good. But if this kind of thing keeps up, my baby is going to be in for a serious denting.

Birding Posts: The Final Movement

I'm at an age where life tends to be self-humbling. This can set you free. When I was packing for my trip to the New River Birding And Nature Festival, preparing to meet a bunch of people I'd only met on line, I was moved to do something about my Mom Jeans. I didn't even know there was anything wrong with Mom Jeans, and when I was brought up to speed, it did occur to me that I ought to be old enough to escape derision for wearing them. Still, I succumbed and bought a pair with a very modest lower-rise. Somehow I didn't notice till I got home that now my underwear was pooching out on top of them. Well, that's it. I'm not getting new underwear to bird in. There's a limit.

I needn't have fretted. Birders are nice people and they aren't going to look at your underwear unless you're perched in a tree forty feet up. Even then they're going to be looking for other identifying field marks. In my case, spots on the chest and a lack of eyebrows.

And while we're on the subject of all those people staring straight upwards into the butts of birds, isn't it time for another good Poop Post? Isn't this a narrative that should just flow? Since I began writing Murrmurrs, poop posts have showed up with regularity. I have a whole collection of Poop Posts piled up over there in the left margin, and those don't even include the ones that only mention poop in passing.

Bird poop is interesting in itself. Birds don't pee, they just produce uric acid and hitch it onto their poop, which together account for the white and dark portions. This way they don't have to fly lugging around a full bladder. They poop, pee, mate and lay eggs using the same hole. It's a one-stop slopping center. This combo pee-poop thing does make bird poop more decorative, which was never more clearly illustrated than recently in Texas when a single bird poop draped over the rear-view mirror of a car attracted a horde of Catholics who saw the Virgin Mary in the splotch. This is just silly. I took a look at a photograph of the poop in question, and it totally could have been Mary Magdalene.

The thing about a good Poop Post is it should come naturally. It should not be forced out. Fortunately, there was a lot of sign on this trip that it was meant to be. You all can go to Disneyland if you want, but I prefer to be in the company of folks who get down on their knees to speculate about turd origins. Here, Julie Zickefoose is conjecturing that the giant doody piles on the bridge might be otter poop. Isn't that exciting? Another of our guides, Jeffrey Gordon, contributed the fact that there is a name for otter poop ("spraint," which sounds painful). With just a little research, I discovered that spraint is best identified by aroma, described as ranging from freshly mown hay to putrefied fish. If Julie didn't get quite close enough for a good snootful, it can only be because she was unaware of this tidbit of knowledge. Because naturalists are brave and wonderful people. If I have a choice, and I do, I'm signing up with otter poop people.

In general, scientists are more interested in poop than anyone but your mother, and she's over it by now. Much can be learned from poop, even dinosaur poop. Scientists study coprolites, which are fossilized dung, for clues as to the diet and health of the depositer. Put another way, a coprolite is a turd that has turned to stone, which, if it's ever happened to you, is no laughing matter. For all we know, that's what did in the dinosaurs.

Still, I might have been able to resist the call of the poop post, if it weren't for the Friendly Waving Poop we all saw at Cranberry Glade. I had stepped over it earlier, and knew it was coyote poop, and when we came back around the same area later, one of the turds was waving at us. Upon closer inspection, it was revealed that a handsome butterfly was feasting on the turd. So much for "pretty is as pretty does."

Five minutes later, we were in the Cranberry Glade Nature Center and came upon an exhibit that I am proposing as the official Murrmurrs Shrine. Please note that the exhibit is protected only by a sheet of Plexiglas, and one or more people had already been compelled to extract portions of the exhibit and stuff them under their shirts. See, it isn't just me.

And when a poop post is in the pipeline, it's best not to hold it in.

The Poop On Gardening

"Urban garden sharing" is the latest trend. It's a terrific idea: one urban dweller might have some land but no time, Urb Two might have time but no money, and a third Urb has money but no land. Ideally, they all get together and everyone gets a tomato.

My gardening hat is off to all those gentle souls able to make a go of garden sharing, and I'll try it too, just as soon as I finish shaking up this box of cats. In my experience, no two gardeners are likely to agree on a plan, and there will have to be a lot of compromising. I'm the only gardener at this house. If the flower garden were up to Dave, we'd have an expertly installed platform of concrete, stained green in the spirit of compromise. So I get the whole flower garden to my self.

Sort of. The bird population is also keen on planting, and they don't have the same vision I do. I would like to see a rolling, undulating celebration of color and texture, with each wave of perennial beauty giving way to the next, azaleas to peonies to penstemons to agastaches, spiced with bulbs and punched up here and there with the vivid spark of annuals. The bird population has in mind something more along the lines of a holly forest with a galloping understory of blackberry.

Our methods differ also. My method is to dig nice big holes, juice them up with homemade compost and maybe a shot of pumice, lay in healthy small plants, firm up the soil around their roots, water, and fertilize. This totally freaks them out and half of them die outright a few weeks later, and then I pull them out. I get compliments with this method. "You must know so much about plants! Everything looks so healthy!" is a typical comment. That's because I've pulled up everything that crapped out. Sometimes, if I'm pressed for time, I bring things home from the nursery and pitch them straight into the compost pile.

The bird population takes more of a blitzkrieg approach to planting. I sow, they strafe. I invest time, money and effort in a horticultural Marshall Plan. For the birds, it's Holly Seeds Over London. Their method is wildly successful. And a two-inch holly tree has a hell of a grip on life.

In my more philosophical moments, I realize I can learn from my fellow gardeners. They're not given to angst or self-doubt. Or second-guessing. Or constipation.

The neighborhood cats have been planting stuff too. I have also learned from them. I wear gloves all the time now.

Things That Fall Out Of The Sky

It was getting on the middle of August, time for the annual Perseids meteor shower. Dave and I are always holding out hope for a celestial doozy, something you could read the newspaper by, something just this side of a war zone. The way I see it, a person's got to die some time, and there are a lot worse ways to go about it than to be hailed on by flaming space rocks. We bring our best attitudes, lying in the lawn chairs, pointing our marshmallows towards the sky. Hey, optimism is free. But although Portland, Oregon is a pretty terrific city, it's still a city, and if one is to really appreciate a meteor shower, it's best to go a little ways out of town.

So we went to Maine.

Sadly, this involved air travel. Air travel can produce horrors for even the most intrepid traveler, and I am notably trepid. Even my most routine trips have a way of going sideways. All I had to do in this case was get myself deposited in Boston and I would be scooped up and carried off by loving friends with cars, brains and everything. I would be ferried about without a care. Linder or Walter would take care of everything. Just get to Boston.

Not long ago, Dave and I had attempted to fly to Portland, Maine, where Linder and Walter were planning to retrieve us. At that time, they probably were unaware of our unique proclivity for disaster, and were merrily on their way to fetch us when we woke up on the floor of the LaGuardia airport, in the wrong gate, having missed our connecting flight to Maine by a good hour. Not many people with a five-hour layover miss their connecting flights. Not many people can fall asleep on the floor at LaGuardia. Not many square feet of floor at LaGuardia are devoid of bird poop.

We had a crumpled piece of paper with Linder and Walter's cell numbers on it and frantically threw quarters into a phone at the terminal, which hoovered them up like a slot machine. The poor phone had not seen action in years and was clearly starving to death. It balked and barked and finally held onto a tenuous connection long enough for us to reach our friends and save them another hour of driving. One much-later flight, a taxi ride, a stint on Greyhound and about twelve hours later, we were scooped up at Boston and all of us tried beerily to put the day behind us.

So on this occasion Walter reviewed the arrangements by e-mail and asked, in a hopeless postscript, if we had somehow managed to acquire our own cell phones in the intervening year. (Even in e-mail his query had a certain bleakness to it, as though he were a musician on the Titanic examining the bass fiddle for buoyancy.) Of course, we hadn't.

We boarded the plane without incident, set up shop in 27B and 27C, and peered nervously at the passengers coming up the aisle. And there, lurching towards us straight out of a Gahan Wilson cartoon, wide, squid-eyed, and unhinged, was the proud tenant of seat 27A, who wedged himself in and began to expand. It was only two hours to Salt Lake City--not so very long a time to sit with my shoulders bunched up under my ears. On the next leg, however, I was delighted to discover that the window seat was occupied by a small woman, neat and narrow, who slotted herself into the seat with enough room left over for her entire aura, and who smelled like nothing at all. Ah! There she sat, just she and her romping little rhinovirus, which she presented in aerosol form for the next four hours.

Boston. Just make it to Boston. The sky was clear as we began our descent, right on time. There wasn't a cloud in it, except one really turgid one right on the runway, looking like something the tarmac burped up all on its own. The plane abruptly plunged into darkness and when the runway finally appeared, about ten yards below, it was not the section of runway the pilot had in mind. The engines roared and the plane clambered back up to the sky and headed away. After a few minutes the pilot chimed on, cheery. "Well, folks," he said predictably, "that little cloud back there wanted to give us a little trouble, so the tower has given us leave to circle around for a little while until it clears up. But don't worry--we'll get you folks back on the ground in another five minutes, one way or the other."

"Another five minutes" does not actually mean the five minutes coming right up, but rather a whole different five-minutes about an hour into the future. Also? There's only one way I'm interested in getting back on the ground. Not the other.